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Dear all
Thank you very much for all your suggestions and info. Much appreciated.
Mgnv - thanks in particular for taking the time to provide me with so much information. I don't mind if I don't see my great great gran's signature in this case (I'm finding quite a few were illiterate in those days anyway) but I'd like to get additional confirmation on her name and her husband's name to confirm whether I've found the right family on census returns. According to my research so far, my great gran's mother was a widow who married a widower. The latter already had a family but then had two more children (my great gran Elizabeth Letitia and her brother). Not long afterwards, he died and the two children plus mother went into Bermondsey workhouse. On Eliz Letitia's marr. cert her father is called Benjamin Joseph but on the census returns I can only find a Joseph Benjamin. I know this is probably the same person but I'm looking for additional evidence (I also have her mother's name, maiden name and first marr. name - according to the census, if I've found the right family). I'd like to be sure as otherwise my ancestral history at that point could have been entirely different and if I haven't found the right parents I don't want to delve further back. I also wonder if the birth cert. would give the address of Eliz's birth as I work near Bermondsey and could check out whether the street/house still stands! I've found the site of the workhouse (now a park - with a notice to say what it was) and St. Mary Magdalen Church where she and her brother were baptised.
You also mention the possibility of getting the cert from Southwark Reg Office - would this be any cheaper/quicker than GRO? Again, could I call in?
Thanks again for all your help.
Regards
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You should use FreeBMD not Genes.
They have altered the record to modern format.
EG
Sep 1843
ADAMS George Thomas Bermondsey 4 21
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For info on all aspects of BMD's you can do no better than look on here
http://home.clara.net/dixons/Certificates/indexbd.htm
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Your gg gran or whoever will have gone to the local subdistrict rego office, say the Leather Market one, to rego your g gran's birth. She would have signed the register and gone home.
At the end of the quarter, the local registrar will copy out all the BMDs for that quarter and send them to the Bermondsey district superintendent. He'ld collect all the subdistrict BMDs and send them off to the GRO in London (later Southport) and they'ld take them district by district and bind them into volumes, and then produce an index covering all the volumes (this index is what you'll have seen).
You can order a BMD cert from either the Southwark Rego Office (they hold the old Bermondsey registers now) or the GRO. The GRO has digitalized their registers, so you will now get an image of the original registrar's copy (which was probably done by a clerk, not him for all it matters). If you order from Southwark, they'll probably write you out a fresh copy. Most local offices lack the capability of digitizing their images, so you likely won't see your gg gran's signature.
Two exceptions I know of are Birmingham and Scotland.
(In Scotland, they decided to digitize the local copies and collect them on their SP website.
Marriages also are a different sort of exception. Pre-1898, CofE, quakers and jews kept registers as well as the registrar. (A non-conformist marr would need the registrar to attend, so they could sign his register, and obviously his register would be signed in a rego office marr.) The C of E, etc "minister" would send a copy of his marr registration to the district office pretty quick - I think it was the district office's responsibility to make the quarterly copies for the GRO (but I'm not sure). After 1898, all sorts of non-conformists were authorized to keep registers (but not RC's until 1980-ish).
When an official register is full, it gets sent somewhere - the subdistrict ROs get sent to the district RO. The church registers get sent usually to the county records office. The older non-conformist and RC registers may have been signed, but they're not really official public records, and it's up to the church what they do with them. The RC regos are usually sent to the diocese archive.
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Great! Thanks very much, Kay. Will do that.
Best wishes
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hi,
yes you can order a "copy of the certificate and from then it will be handwritten as it was entered in the original register office registers.
www.gro.gov.uk
just follow the onscreen instructions and quote details and make your payment,,,,,.overseas currency accepted , >>>.
vol
page.
name
quarter..m/jun/sep/dec.
year.
date when born,where born & parent/parents name will appear if app, plus ocupation of father,
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Hi
Is it possible to order from GRO old birth certificates where the birth record is handwritten on the GR record or is that all there is? I've found a record from 1843 (on the GR site) that just gives "Vol. IV, Page 21" as a reference. Is there a birth cert I can obtain or if not, can I consult such a volume (if so, where?) to find out if the parents' names are given?
Thanks for any help.
Best wishes to all
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